A piercing denunciation of Islamophobia in France, in the tradition of Emile Zola

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming “There is a problem with Islam in France,” thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims have been strengthened by the backlash since the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, coming to represent a new ‘common sense’ in the political landscape, and we have seen a similar logic play out in the United States and Europe.

Edwy Plenel, former editorial director of Le Monde, essayist and founder of the investigative journalism website Mediapart tackles these claims head-on, taking the side of his compatriots of Muslim origin, culture or belief, against those who make them into scapegoats. He demonstrates how a form of “Republican and secularist fundamentalism” has become a mask to hide a new form of virulent Islamophobia. At stake for Plenel is not just solidarity but fidelity to the memory and heritage of emancipatory struggles and he writes in defence of the Muslims, just as Zola wrote in defence of the Jews and Sartre wrote in defence of the blacks. For if we are to be for the oppressed then we must be for the Muslims.

Reviews

“Thank goodness for this humane, civilized and morally brave book. It speaks important truths which these days are much too rarely heard.”

– Peter Oborne

“A powerful call to address the empathy deficit and intellectual poverty
which underlies the “obsessive Islamophobia” of much French public
discourse. Noting that Islamophobia now performs the cultural function
once assigned to anti-Semitism, For the Muslims is a polemic against
indifference. Plenel resurrects France’s heritage of critical thought to call
on his fellow citizens and others to develop a competing imaginary to the
one established by rampant xenophobia.”

– Priyamvada Gopal

“An important book about one of the most pressing issues facing
modern Europe. Insightful, historically grounded and detailed, it’s
required reading.”

– Murtaza Hussain

“An urgent and necessary warning cry against hatred and the politics of
fear and indifference that fuels it. From the Dreyfus affair to the aftermath
of the Paris attacks of 2015, Plenel shows how the normalization of
a far-right narrative of rejection, exclusion and otherness will have
consequences for us all.”

In this excerpt from Ibn Khaldun: The Birth of History and the Past of the Third World, Yves Lacoste shows how Ibn Khaldun's work refutes the myth of the "Arab invasions [of the Maghreb] of the eleventh century," despite the uses to which it has been put by the authors of the myth.

In any case, what sticks out amidst this mass vote is a feeling of absurdity. The absurdity of a mechanism that brings to power a man we know nothing about, and who has grounded his success precisely in his capacity to say nothing (the back cover of his book Révolution has not one line of text, but just a full page photo of Macron himself). The absurdity of a system that gives a crushing majority to such a man, in order to avoid a danger that is largely imaginary. Most of all, the absurdity of a focus on elections that we all feel have nothing to do with our lives, and which we all feel are playing out on a sort of flying carpet, above our heads.